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Dark Souls 2 Design Ravings

Dark Souls 1 may be my favourite game. It has stern competition from the original Command & Conquer, but there are no other games in the last few years I’ve poured as many hours into. As you might expect, therefore, when Dark Souls 2 came along I quickly preordered one of the super-special editions, happy in the knowledge I would be sending some more money to a company who had made an absolutely stunning game the last time around, and a game I only paid £10 or so for after it had been out a year. Having played it through once – and then having gone back to the original for my first playthrough in around half a year – I found myself with so much to write about I just had to put some of these thoughts to paper. If you’re not interested in some detailed thoughts about the two Souls games I’ve played (I have yet to play Demon’s Souls), feel free to skip this one. Otherwise, let’s begin. I’ll start off talking about the things the game does better, then I’ll talk about the things the game does worse (alas, a list that is both much longer and deals with much more significant parts of the game), and then conclude with some final thoughts on the whole business.

For Better:

User Interface:

The UI is clearer – you can see more items at once, check out a larger selection of items more easily, and so forth.

PvP Lag:

Although I have been hearing issues about the “soul memory” system in the game – designed to help balance PvP encounters, but apparently it can be exploited in order to do the exact opposite – the loss of lag is a hugely important point here. Even if the PvP mechanics may be weaker this time around I still prefer to play this in DS2, not 1, simply because the lag is pleasingly minimal. It doesn’t have the minimal latency of something like CS:S, but it’s still eminently playable now, and doesn’t boil down – quite as much – to farming backstabs by exploiting the lag.

NPC Invasions:

There seem to be many more NPC invasions now which come at a variety of points in the game. These NPCs have an interesting range of builds, appear whether you are human or hollowed, and are much more challenging than the ones in the original. The fact they appear regardless of your status is also a huge step in the right direction for the concept.

Resting at Bonfires:

You now only need to touch a bonfire to activate it, not sit at it. Entirely minor, but nice.

Multiple Soul Uses:

You can now choose how many in a pile of souls to use at once instead of having to pop each at the same time. Truly wonderful.

Humanity/Human Effigy Improvement:

Humanity is no longer an item you only use if you actively want to PvP, or if you want to kindle a bonfire. Instead, the new “Human Effigy” item gives you a real reason to be human – each time you die your maximum health is reduced slightly, so the Effigy becomes an item that you possibly want to use before particularly tough sections, maybe even between bonfires (though as I’ll go onto later, the bonfire placement is far too kind this time around), and balancing how often to use them vs their scarcity is a good move in the right direction. Equally, the removal of some specifications around invasions and being human/hollowed combines with this change very well.

New Items:

There are many more usable items (like firebombs, resins, etc), and the extra variety is appreciated. I couldn’t find more than one or two of them on my first playthrough however, nor anyone who sold most of them, but I shall assume I missed it.

For Worse:

Level design.

This is one of the big ones. The level design is, unfortunately, scarily simplistic compared to the two dozen labyrinths we traversed back in Dark Souls 1. This was a feeling I got to an extent upon playing DS2 first, but after I went back to DS1 and explored areas like the Painted World anew, this realization simply could not be ignored. Here is a map of one early area in Dark Souls 2, Heide’s Tower of Flame…

…and here is a map of a mid-game area from Dark Souls, Sen’s Fortress:

Just flick your eyes between those maps (thanks to the Dark Souls wikis for both). Yes, the first is a sketch and the second is detailed and neat; yes, Heide’s Tower of Flame is simply a smaller area; yes, Dark Souls’ Ash Lake and Lost Izalith, for example, are very linear (though even Ash Lake has more alternate routes than HToF!); but the problem is, the Tower of Flame map is indicative of almost every area in Dark Souls 2 – a straight line with one or two tiny diversions – whilst the Sen’s Fortress map is equally indicative of almost every area in Dark Souls 1. The only large, densely-packed area is the Lost Bastille, which has five bonfires. In Dark Souls, an area of that size – the Burg, say, or the Painted World, or the Depths – would have one or possibly two, but the level would be designed in such a way that there are multiple paths to take, shortcuts to unlock, and the level design would be incredibly dense as a result. This pattern unfortunately repeats across the game. Most areas are fundamentally a straight line with a few minor tangents that basically lead back to the same original direction; almost no-where is that multi-layered maze-like level design that worked so incredibly well in the original DS.

The second issue with the level design is more aesthetic and thematic. For any game with an “exploration” factor the ability to surprise the player is surely paramount. This may seem obvious, yet many games fail this simple test – the only place in Skyrim that might awe the player is Blackreach, for example. In the rest of the game, even though you don’t know specifically what lurks in each cave, you do know what lurks there in more general terms. You know what a Dwarven ruin will look like, what a cave will look like, what a draugr-infested place looks like, etc. I really value the moment where the game confounds your expectations, or shows you something you didn’t even know was there, or gets you totally rethinking what you thought you knew.

One of the best things for me about the Souls series is their ability to constantly surprise you. Maybe for a boss you’ll fight another player, or maybe you’ll uncover a secret in the most obscure of places, or find a region whose architecture makes you utterly reevaluate the fictional world in which you play (a la Ash Lake). Unfortunately I found the first half lacking in this regard – one boss surprised me and sent me spiraling into a little pondering of the in-game lore, but otherwise nothing really struck me and amazed me. The gameplay was fine, the storytelling decent (though too many items boil down to “This sword was used by an ancient hero – or was it?”), the aesthetics of the world (mostly) as great as ever, but nothing made me rethink what I thought I knew. However, the later half of Dark Souls 2 really picks up in this regard. In the first half there was probably only one area which had the same impact as being snatched by the crow out of the Undead Asylum, seeing the Moonlight Butterfly perched upon a distant ledge, descending into Blighttown and realizing an entire civilization squats amid the foundations of Lordran, being cursed for the first time, or winding up in the jail in the Duke’s Archives. All those moments in Dark Souls both impressed me with the creativity and the audacity of the game’s design, and made me feel the game could continue to surprise me both aesthetically and mechanically.

Passing through Darkroot Garden, you see this perhaps minutes, perhaps hours, before you ever encounter it close up…

Although the first half lacks any real surprises and often feels like a rehash of DS1 – indeed, see the plot spoilers below, there is a reason for this – the second half of DS2, in fairness, has many such moments. At one point I was sure I was approaching the penultimate boss which I thought would just be followed by a 5-minute ride to the final boss, and then discovered the boss I expected was actually an NPC and three entirely new areas had just opened up to me; at another, rather than descending down into the depths of the planet (a common Souls theme) I found myself climbing up higher than one has ever been in a Souls game (this is debatable based on your interpretation of Drangleic geography, but I think this region is subjectively significantly higher than Anor Londo was). Another point saw a visually arresting area unlike anything before in a Souls game whilst elsewhere assorted secrets referencing the original game point towards all manner of lore speculation. Whenever I thought I knew what the was going on and what the game “was”, on some fundamental level, it changed things up and surprised me, and that is something an exploration-focused game should always try to do.

The last aspect of level design lacking is that foreshadowing the previous game did so well. Often you could make out something in the distance, either a structure or a boss, and later would find your way towards it. This made the entire world feel incredibly connected (see the next section) and quickly raised the interest and excitement to get to this location on the player’s part. The “here’s something you’ll be fighting!” is less common this time around, or rather, is almost entirely lacking. In DS1 Ceaseless, Kalameet, the Moonlight Butterfly and the Iron Golem are all enemies you likely see long before you ever fight them, and you wonder – are these bosses? NPCs? When will I fight them? To its credit, Dark Souls 2 undermined this expectation nicely by turning what I was sure would be a boss into a very cryptic (and very large) NPC towards the end, and similarly I was very surprised when encountering a character I’d heard a lot about (and knowing the Souls’ series perspective on “King” characters), but these were really the only two examples. You cannot see outside the little corridors the game channels you down at any point, and the corridors themselves are, for the most part, sadly very dull.

World design.

Roughly speaking, the world structures of each game are as follows (in both cases you begin in the middle).

Dark Souls 1 is split into two halves – the first half of the game where you navigate the central interconnected wheel, and then you gain access to a fast-travel system and the four spokes open up. Once you’ve reached this point you know your way around the core well, and fast travel is only available to pursue the paths that branch out. It is worth noting that the levels on this path – Duke’s Archives, Tomb of the Giants, Painted World, etc – are every big as multi-layered as the others, but they just don’t connect with each other. When you’re in these regions you can still see other parts of the map, and the world still feels huge because you’ve explored most of it before gaining access to the fast travel system. By contrast, the latter game is a very simple structure. You have four main paths, and later you gain access to the branching path in the bottom corner. No regions connect with each other. This, combined with the fact you can now warp from the start, combine to make the world in Dark Souls 2 seem flat, uninteresting, unconnected (because it is!) and simply a far less interesting place to explore.

In Dark Souls, on one’s first playthrough, one is overwhelmingly likely to pass through the “expected” route – through the Burg, the Parish, the Depths, Blighttown, and through to Quelaag. However, if you really look around (and fight through some Drakes), you can sequence-break that and move around a lot of Blighttown. Alternatively, if you take the Master Key on a later playthrough, you can totally change the order you do everything by opening the tower Havel is locked in, or even more importantly, the door between New Londo and Blighttown allows you fight Quelaag first if you’re so inclined. You can also fight the Four Kings as anywhere between the second, and the penultimate boss, of the entire game. Sadly, nowhere in DS2 is there a comparitive level of freedom to decide on your own route even once you know the game well. Even though the hub area has many routes, most are closed off when you start, and it only really offers you five linear paths, and the second half of the game – although far stronger – also sticks to the generally linear regions. There is no sense of mastery over the game world on repeated playthroughs, nor a reinforcement of the idea that you are exploring one area.

Another glaring weakness is, as hinted at above, is that even the levels that lead to each other are not connected! You almost never see things in the distance you’ll later find your way to, and the rare times you do – for example, you can see the Tower of Flame from Majula – the perspective and location are all wrong. However, the most shameful example of this involves the middle of one of the early paths the game sends you down, when you find the structure shown below.

You will note, I am sure, that there is nothing atop this windmill-castle-thing. No lift, no path, and certainly no volcano. Indeed, there is no volcano anywhere even remotely in sight. As you progress through this region (Earthen Peak), you reach the top of the structure and defeat the boss. After that, you get in a lift and go upwards… into the air… and emerge into this area, Iron Keep, a castle within a volcano with lava and flame for miles around.

Which, basically, means this area of the world is laid out like this…

…and the upper half is entirely invisible from the ground (Credit for first two pictures go to Matthewmatosis (Youtube), last picture to maplejoker-anno.tumblr). This hammered home to me more than anything else that these were just levels in a game, not segments of an actual world I was exploring. Anything like this would not have been considered for a heartbeat in the beautifully pieced-together map of DS1 – where you can stand atop Sen’s Fortress and look down upon the Parish, or walk through the Tomb of Giants and catch a glimpse of Ash Lake – and, whilst this example is more extreme than others, this repeats throughout the game. A quick look at the map viewer for the game shows a huge number of both logical and thematic discrepancies. No-Man’s Wharf is way below the sea level seen from the Bastille, Sinner’s Rise is entirely invisible from up above, going up the lift from Aldia’s Keep launches you into a sky area you hadn’t seen anything of before (though a visually amazing region), whilst the Shaded Woods path goes from a forest into an area akin to the Giant’s Causeway (again, aesthetically impressive, but entirely incongruous) and then into a desert all without any real warning.

Ultimately, Lordran felt like a single location that had stood for thousands of years and finally fallen into ruin, through-out which you might run across a few other souls on their own personal quests or missions, picking through the ruins of this astonishing megastructure/city/fortress that stretched far up into the sky and deep underground. Drangleic, alas, feels like a sequence of tunnels and people specifically laid out to greet the player at every turn. It’s more like a sequence of “levels” akin to, say, early FPS games where you basically “teleport” between each level (Goldeneye style), rather than anything approaching a connected world. In fact, although the areas in Demon’s Souls are not connected, I believe they do not overlap either in as horrifying or jarring a way as some of the DS2 ones do.

Story.

I recently bought the Dark Souls design works book, which is fascinating. At the back is an interview with Hidetaka Miyazaki, the design lead on the first two Souls games, and in the interview he mentions that one of his inspirations for the lore of the Souls games was reading Western fantasy books/RPGs – his English wasn’t amazing, so he wasn’t entirely clear on what was going on, and had to form his own connections. This in turn inspired the way the story/lore are told in Souls games, and I for one love it (and it is something I aim to emulate in URR). I think the storytelling in DS2 remains strong and encourages you to piece things together, but those pieces are far less interesting than the pieces in the original game.

PLOT SPOILERS BELOW.

Seriously, major ones. I know some people – like me – read at a pace where just seeing “spoiler warning” is not enough to stop you reading before you read on a few words, so let this sentence be the final warning. If you’re like me and adore the Souls story, stop reading at once. Otherwise, let me state up front – Dark Souls 2 introduces the idea of a repeating or cyclic history. I have no objection to the “cyclic nature of history” plot ideas – Japanese games seem more willing to use this than their Western counterparts, but this is far from an exclusive rule (e.g. Mass Effect). However, in this case I think From Software made a colossal misstep by assigning a cyclic history to the Dark Souls lore. Now, I should state, to an extent the existing lore suggests a cyclic history, on a very small scale – the bonfires keep those cursed endlessly resurrecting, yes, but on the grander scale of history Dark Souls 1 has no mention of repeating patterns. The world began with the dragons; the Lord Souls were discovered; Gwyn forged “civilization” atop the archtrees; but now even his soul is beginning to fade, and must either be replaced or allowed to die. Nothing repeating or replaying is mentioned. By contrast, a little delving into DS2 lore makes it quite clear this is the case – “many civilizations” have risen and fallen on the spot where Drangleic stands (which is where Lordran once stood); the four Lord Souls have been taken by other creatures, who have been defeated by other “chosen undeads” (though DS1 does imply this very concept is a fictional creation if you talk to Kaathe or consider the role played by Gwyndolin), who have each had to make a choice about keeping the First Flame going or allowing Dark to spread. You begin the game tasked with seeking four Great Souls, and each of these corresponds to one of the four from the original game – Seath, Gwyn, the Witch of Izalith and Nito (though Seath had a fragment of Gwyn’s soul, the nature of the Dark Soul is different in DS2). They have taken new forms, but their origins are apparent for those who care to look. The new location of Seath’s soul features a Duke and an entombed Dragon; the new owner of Gwyn was also a king who overreached; the new owner of the Witch’s soul tried to relight the first flame and appears to have been cursed by Chaos; while Nito’s new owner is also a foul amalgamation of corpses dwelling far below the Earth. This isn’t “cyclic history” – this is just repeating the same ideas, which were wonderful the first time, but we’ve seen them before.

As much as I wish to say this is just a part of the story… it just strikes me as lazy. By the game’s own admission the first half is a “repeat” as you gather the same four Souls. For those Lore-buffs, you will note that the Lord Souls are what gave Gwyn et al their power, not something inherent to those individuals/creatures themselves. That may be, but that’s no excuse to just say “other creatures now have these souls and are rather similar to their original owners!”. The second half of the game when you break away from the four Souls from the first game is far more interesting and varied and had far more “surprise” moments than the first half, which (sadly) only contained one or two. In general the original lore – about Navlaan, Aldia, the Dragon, the Giants – is genuinely great, and I’ve enjoyed keeping track of the internet’s collective deductions about all this new lore, but the rehashed lore is very uninteresting.

PLOT SPOILERS END.

NPCs.

In Dark Souls 1 each of the few NPC characters has their own story which might not necessarily link up with your tale; they have their own objectives, and you can only trade/talk with them for certain periods. They move through the world and may die or live on their own quests. Completing these quests was an interesting extra challenge in the first game and one lacking in Dark Souls 2. NPCs don’t generally have their own quests, and once they get to the game’s hub, they then just don’t go anywhere! They just sit still until the end of the game and never do a blasted thing. Many of DS1’s characters were far more tragic – Solaire and Seigmeyer spring to mind, not to mention Sif and Artorias – whilst DS2 lacks a single NPC I felt a damned thing for, though I guess Lucatiel wasn’t half-bad. And I am convinced that “Laddersmith” is not a real profession.

Enemies/bosses.

There is a fine line between “homage” and “reusing the same art and AI assets we used in the first time”, and alas, Dark Souls 2 falls squarely on the wrong side of that divider. Two entire bosses from DS1 are simply lifted wholesale into DS2 whilst others (Najka, Royal Rat Authority) are lifted from DS1 but reskinned and with a few new moves, and others (Royal Rat Vanguard, Dragonrider, and then… Twin Dragonriders!) are, as much as it hurts me to say it, just phoned in. I am not rose-tinting DS1’s bosses – Ceaseless has hitboxes large enough to strike you in the next country, the Bed of Chaos is a travesty – but the selection is far more limited, many have far less impact (as they have less lore behind them) and some are simply direct copies, even with the exact same name as in DS1. DS2 does have some great bosses – the Smelter Demon has an interesting core mechanic (proximity does damage), the Executioner’s Chariot is very different and original, the Demon of Song is a magnificent concept (though not the most fascinating fight), but… the list is short.

Repeated Chest Ahead!

Other, much smaller issues:

Four K-, er, Rings:

You can now put on four rings instead of two. This is a totally pointless change; any meaningful decision-making between your rings is gone. In Dark Souls 1 the Abyss forces you to use one ring for the Covenant of Artorias and thereby restricts you to a single ring; Lost Izalith all but requires the Orange Charred Ring to survive on lava; many rings are very strong in Dark Souls 1 and – unless you’re a good enough player to have the Red Tearstone Ring on 24/7 – offers a lot of tricky choices. Even the amazing Ring of Favor and Protection, boosting three key stats, breaks permanently when removed; its cousin in DS2 can simply be repaired. Four rings is far too much, and there was no point where I felt uncertain about which to wear. Also, the Ring of Binding is vastly overpowered (for singleplayer, anyway).

If you kill an NPC, they return as a grave, and you can still interact with a ghost. So there is now no penalty for killing NPCs, and the weight of your decisions in DS1 are lost. Souls games are meant to eschew the weak hand-holding of so many modern games, and yet they’ve removed a minor but excellent aspect of it here.

Cursing:

Cursing – which used to be a permanent reduction of your max health by 50% until it is cured – is now an almost meaningless ailment, thereby constituting another step back from the amazingly bold/confident (ballsy?) game design of DS1.

Summary:

So what went wrong? For the most part I enjoyed my first playthrough, even though some bits left me cold the first time I was playing them. Other parts impressed with their aesthetics or some of their enemies, but upon further consideration their linearity compared to the first game became apparent. The fundamental problems are two-fold – the development team tried too hard to create Dark Souls 2 instead of a new Souls game, and – for whatever reasons – they moved away from the maze-like structure of the first game (at both the individual level scale and the entire world scale) towards a world of straight lines with minimal deviation. Too much of the first half draws from the first game; too few bosses, NPCs or areas feel at all original; and too many regions just boil down to straight lines which try to cover up wildly inconsistent geography. There are many small improvements, but the few major steps backwards are just too significant. After finishing DS2 I returned to DS1 for the first time in six months and instantly fell back into its incredible world. I thought I was certain to want to 100% DS2, and yet nothing from that world actually calls me back. There’s so much to go through to get to the more interesting segments, and even those segments are still just walking from one point to another. I’m sure I’ll revisit it some day, but Lordran, not Drangleic, remains my Dark Souls home.

36 thoughts on “Dark Souls 2 Design Ravings”

Nice article, but what happened to the one about Perfect Dark? I got a notice on my blog list, but when I tried to read the blog entry, it’s not there. I played the original Perfect Dark to death, but didn’t see the re-release so i was curious.

Ha, well, I accidentally clicked “Publish” before it was finished, so I had to swiftly un-publish it! There’s a good chance that’s the one I’ll post next week, but we’ll see. Likewise on the original, that’s one of the major reasons I wanted to really take a retrospective on it, especially since so many modern reviewers criticized the level design when it was re-released.

Hmm. I am much less sad that i didnt buy DS2 already now. Sure better PVP is nice and all but.. For me the things that made DS1 great are largely the things that got more simple, and so for me less interesting, or flat out cheap in DS2.

I was deciding between DS2 and Divinity Original Sin during the summer sale. Glad I went with the later.

I’m glad I played it, but I would honestly be surprised if I ever replay it again (though I suspect I will play the three DLCs when they come out). By contrast I’ve gone back to DS1 and completed it again, and love it every bit as much as the first time I played it – if I could wipe my mind of a single game and play it anew, it would be DS1.

I have removed several vitriolic and off-topic comments from this post; I have always welcomed and encouraged constructive criticism, but random hatred and insults directed towards me and the game are a different thing altogether.

i dont think the story in DS2 is anywhere near as successful as DS1s but I think you’ve missed the mark here, like, the idea that history in DS2 is cyclical comes from tryin to interpret its implied chronology of the lore linearly, when the game is signalling at you, throwin up contradictions, at attempts to do that. try to figure out how the iron king fits into drangleics history and the drangelic you’re presented with, for example. time is all bound up–theres no beginning or end, maybe, but its a knot rather than a cycle. further i don’t think there’s any evidence that DS2 is an expansion of DS1s lore rather than something more akin to an isomorphism, which is another assumption you need to make to view DS2 as cyclical.

also i’m super surprised that you point out the contradictory geography but then don’t make anything of it, beyond registering your dislike of it. the volcano isn’t exactly subtle. it parallels ds2s conception of time. to be explicit–drangelic isn’t a specific place (lordran) in a specific time (some number of cycles in the future). its all places in all times, jumbled together & given history by its inhabitants. more italo calvino than robert jordan

idk. you mention lore deductions but i think ds2–and ds1 did this too, again more successfully–has little interest in being deduced per se. Dark Souls would often leave some of its lore to be implied by the landscape you found yourself in and Dark Souls 2 tried to do the same, imo

Thanks for the interesting post. Your interpretation is one I haven’t really considered before, given all the “time is convoluted” stuff – I understand where you’re coming from, but I don’t agree. There seem to be a thousand suggestions that DS2’s lore is an expansion: so many items reference DS1, so many bosses, the entire first half of the game and the four great souls! We are explicitly told in DS1 that the original 4 were the first to take the souls, and DS2 mentions that Vendrick defeated “four” (so there have clearly been many cycles, of which DS1’s four were the first). Everything points to Drangleic being chronologically after Lordran, and that much has influenced by Lordran’s history.

As for the volcano, I *cannot* agree it parallels the conception of time! It’s just laziness! Especially since DS1 was totally coherent in its geography, it established “in this world, things do not overlap geographically”, and then smashed it in DS2. I think you’re giving them too much credit – don’t get me wrong, I love From and I’d like to give them credit, but I really don’t think this can count. The “time is convoluted” thing was always a shaky justification for multiplayer, but it worked fine, but I really don’t think this is the same syndrome (as much as I love Italo Calvino). And I think the lore DOES want to be deduced; they seem to have struck such a perfect balance in DS1 to allow you to fill in the gaps (think about other media one has seen/watched/played where you either think “well, they left nothing to the imagination”, or “well, they didn’t explain anything! DS1 is the perfect middleground).

I do, however, agree re: the landscape being part of the lore (though again this was stronger in 1) in 2, and I liked those parts, but again, just too much of it “hey, this is like that bit in DS1″.

Very nice post, however I feel you missed an important part of dark souls 2’s endings.

You say:

“On the grander scale of history Dark Souls 1 has no mention of repeating patterns.”

This is not quite true. Although the cycle has never happened before, the endings set upthe idea that it will happen again.

Fire turns to embers and eventually ceases to burn, when you kindle the flame at the ending, you sacrifice yourself as fuel for it, but it is implied that one day the flame will wane again, and a new soul will be needed to rekindle the flame.

By the same token, if you do not sacrifice yourself, the first flame still exists, waiting as long as necessary for someone to sacrifice itself as it´s fuel.

so while it is the first cycle, it is heavily implied that it will happen again. Before knowing pretty much anything about the game exept that it was a sequel to DS, I knew it would happen during a new cycle.

Also I am not so sure, that drangleic is in the same geographical location as Lordram. Personally I like the idea drangleic is near to the place Gwynevere went to after marrying Flann. The lord sous tend to be near each other,and the sunlight altar is a different one(worship of the sun was once widespread, so there should be many different sunlight altars around the world)

Ah, hmm, yes. I agree the setting yourself up for the fire ending does imply it will happen again, but there is a fundamental difference between how DS1 treats it and how DS2 treats it. DS1 gives you the *choice* – it emphasizes trhat there is nothing *inherent* about a cyclic history, it is not guaranteed, and if the flame does repeat, it is due to the choice of the chosen undead. There is no external force that pushes history to repeat. By contrast, in 2, not just are you not given the fire/Dark choice, but much of the content/dialogue implies that the cyclic history is something inherent in the world, not something created by the choice(s) of Chosen Undeads. Indeed, Vendrick is depicted as having fought against that history, not that he simply decided not to relight the fire, and that was that. In DS2 a cyclic history is abstracted out to be some kind of hidden moving force behind the world, whereas I would say there is no hint of this in 1 – the player has the choice, and there is no magical mystical force driving you either way.

Re: Geographical Location, although I’ve heard the Flann hypothesis, I don’t think it holds up. So many items are from Lordran, the Sunlight Altar is identical (!), so many people make reference to multiple kingdoms on the same spot etc… I agree it is not 100% certain, but I think the evidence for it being Lordran (especially given the presence of the 4 great souls) is a lot stronger than not. Many thanks for the comment – as with all Souls things I agree it is not 100% either way, but I think the difference between the presentation of history in 1 & 2 is really key.

I can see what you mean about the difference in presentation being key.

I think part of the reason I accept the cycles more readily than you comes from this comment of yours:

“much of the content/dialogue implies that the cyclic history is something inherent in the world, not something created by the choice(s) of Chosen Undeads.”

Way I see it what it does is expose the “choosen undead” idea to be a bit rubbish. Kind of like a return to demon´s Souls where there was absolutely nothing special about your character at the beginning of the game.

An undead rekindling the flame it just something that will naturally occur, if the “choosen undead” does not rekindle the flames, it will only lie dormant, until the time someone does comes, it may take a very long while(ages maybe) but eventually sooner or later one of those trying will succeed according to probability theory.

Kind of like the idea that it may take longer and suffer some setbacks, but given enough time cultures tend to became more complex in order to better allow zerosum systems to occur that benefit everyone.

Have you ever read “nonzero” by Robert Wright?

He analyses history trough the lens of game theory, It made me think on procedural creation of civilizations, and helped me a lot when thinking about Game Settings. I would love to hear your opinions on it:

I agree with your criticism of the level design in DS2, though I should make clear I haven´t been able to actually sit down and play the game, just watched other people playing it, and seem map comparison. I really loved the level design in DS and learned a lot from it.

Seem the new DLC has been consistently praised for it´s return to DS-style level design. You planning on picking it up?

can´t edit previous post, the above comennts are about LEVEL design specificcaly, not GAME design.
Though I do think Soul Reaver is tied with the souls series for best “ludonarrative ressonance” in death mechanics.

Ah, that is true re: Chosen Undead, especially what Kaathe says in DS1 which implies heavily there is nothing truly “chosen” about them. Hmm, interesting interpretation re: probability and inevitability; I am inclined to disagree though, but that’s an intriguing angle. I have not read Nonzero – whilst I find game theory very interesting, speaking as a social scientist and having read the Wikipedia summary, it sounds a little on the reductionist side for my tastes! I’m not generally a fan of works that try to describe history/culture/society according to just one single axis, as they lose so much of the complexity of social life in the process. However, I do what you’re getting at in terms of the connection to DS; I’ll have to ponder on that one and get back to you.

Ah, the new DLC – I do, but it’s not high on my list. I’ll have to slog through enough of DS2 again to actually reach the DLC unlock, which is slightly annoying, but I will definitely play it. Probably late this year. Also, I’ve never played it, though my best friend raves about the Soul Reaver games – I may have to give them a look some time!

The way I see it is the description of a processes. The way rain forests propagates and how the diversity of ecosystem contributes to their stability is very interesting in itself, and very important for all sorts of models, but it will never describe the beauty of an actual natural landscape by itself, so to me, the trick to enjoying the book is not to look at it not as something that tries to “describe history/culture/society “, rather as soemthing that tries to describe one specific process that affects this societies.
Though having a background more focused on exact sciences, it may be easier for me.

regarding Soul Reaver: Its is a very well done game, and I think it might well be worth your time, however I should warn you that the controls haven´t aged very well, and it would probably be better to play in a gamepad. Second: it is an incomplete game, they run out of time for making it, and thus made the end a cliffhanger for the sequel.(this last one really disappointed me)

I have removed here a comment that was too close to the edge of what I consider acceptable discourse on this blog. The name the poster used was condescending and dismissive, an image posted was insulting, and the term “bias” was used repeatedly to simply mean “you have a different opinion” and trying to position my perspective as somehow more subjective than those of the poster. I welcome your contribution to this site, but please be polite and attempt to engage constructively with the post instead of attempting to re-position my statements as somehow inherently incorrect by using the word “bias” in every other sentence.

Wonderfully true article. What also disappointed me was the removal of the lighting engine on release, rendering previously too dark passages passable without a torch. It seemed to work great on their testing stations and I wouldn’t mind a few frame rate drops if I could’ve kept the more expressive lighting, particle effects and atmosphere. From various videos I could tell it would’ve been so much better, even with the completely incoherent level design.

Thanks, glad you liked it. That’s also a good point on the lighting, it was heavily toned down from what we saw in the first videos (and I agree, I’d take frame rate drops and slightly better graphics any day of the week). I am immensely excited about Bloodborne, but deliberately keeping myself ignorant of anything, I’ve been on a media blackout for several months now. Now I just need a PS4…

Thank you for putting all of that into words. Dark Souls is also perhaps my favorite videogame of all time (I’m still amazed it dethroned Starflight) and despite the change in director, I had high hopes for DS2. Alas, halfway through the game I realized that it was a shadow of it’s predecessor.

Why displace Miyazaki when he was just coming off of creating one of the greatest games of all time (and the one before that wasn’t too shabby either)? And the fact that DS2 had almost twice the budget makes me shake my fists at the sky to think of what Miyazaki might’ve done with it. The infinite stupidity of upper management never ceases to amaze me.

In hindsight, I must say I wasn’t amazed when the early DS2 trailers came out. I watched them and… they looked interesting, but they didn’t fill me with insane excitement like the AotA DLC did (and indeed when I played it, possibly the best DLC ever made?). I remember at the time trying to be reflexive and identify whether I was being “fair” to the DS2 trailers or not, though I don’t recall what I concluded. DS2 is just too much like walking around “a series of levels in a video game” which have been laid out for the player, whereas DS1 really feels like digging into a world which has *not* been put there for your benefit.

I know! Madness, unless he had some role in specifically wanting to move away from the Souls series and towards Bloodborne. I read a bit about his move from Souls at the time, though I don’t recall how much information about his decision was really available. Hmm… we’ll just have to see how Bloodborne turns out. I want to be hopeful. I really do. Can it recreate the magic? We’ll have to see…

Indeed. Time after time it would hit me – ‘holy crap, down there is Darkroot!’ or, ‘woah, this connects to the undead berg!’ I just wish you could’ve gone through that giant door at the top of Sen’s Fortress instead of being flown up by those demons whose friends then try to kill you later on. That didn’t make much sense.

I’ve never seen any lore discussion about htat giant door. Maybe that’s where the Iron Golem used to be housed? Also, who the hell was Sen??

I know, it’s such an amazing feeling when you first begin to appreciate the connectivity of the world. Hmm, I liked that the player doesn’t go through the Anor Londo door, but at the same time, I agree re: the method that the player is ferried up. I’ve only seen a little bit of lore discussion, the consensus seems to be that the door was either destroyed when everyone left/fled AL, or deliberately destroyed as a further way of blocking access to the city. As for Sen, well… I think that one is a mystery. I saw one theory once that Sen was another name for one of the serpents, but I can’t remember if there was really any support for that (and certainly doesn’t make much sense to me) – I’d think Sen was presumably someone who followed Gwyn, but I don’t think there’s any more detail/evidence on them anywhere.

I forgot my favorite connection – the fact that the sewers emptied into Blighttown. Eons of waste being poured into that valley turns it into the blighted nightmare that it is. It seems like such a small thing. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s those small details that go so far to create the complete immersion that DS offered.

Another one of the small things that contributed to the world was the fact that you found certain types of things in the ‘right’ places. For example, you find the Occult objects in the Painted world because that’s where the gods had hid away threats to them. And that you find Havel’s armor locked away in that hidden room in Anor Londo because he was deemed a traitor. Just awesome.

I liked that one too, though I think my very favourite is either seeing the Moonlight Butterfly before you fight it (as above in this entry, that blew my mind) or being able to peer into Ash Lake from the ToTG. Really magical. Definitely agreed about the items, I love that kind of ludonarrative where you can leave the player to figure out the story based on what they play instead of, say, having you find tape recordings that you play in the background (aspect #145672 of Dark Souls design I’m trying to follow in URR!).

Excuse to comment on an old topic, but I’ve just finished Dark Souls 2 and my mind jump to this post, and later to a doubt in game design I have. It is tangential with the topic of one of the things we love more about DS, the lore and how the game provides it.

But if I must look for a complain is that those piece of lore are inserted in the UI without logic or reason, just because “it s a game”. In some manner is bad storytelling, but of course it is useful for the gameplay.

This is something why I love identifying systems, and the risk of using unidentified objects in Roguelike. Because it is consistent world-building and interesting gameplay.

However I’ve rarely seen any game or rogue to do this the right way, less in Diablo. Diablo has this character, Deckard Cain, it has the role of the sage, so it is logical that he knows the monsters, he knows the lore, he knows the mythical items and weapons, so… it is a great way to identify the objects.

I wonder where are the roots of all this stuff, the identifying system, I imagine they comes from D&D, but maybe this is that kind of things that came underused or simplified for gameplay sake.

I’m designing a game, and I’m considering this, how to provide little pieces of lore for objects and weapons, and for the monsters (like in Symphony of the Night and his bestiary). I think I will use that, a sage, because, my hero is a master at the art of war, so, it is logical that he knows the basic weapons, the basic enemies, but what about the magic artefacts? the supernatural elements that are alien to him?

I’m thinking to build some kind of bestiary that you could bring with a picture of a monster to a sage, so he could fill the details of the lore…

I’m rambling… but I think you see my point. So… what do you think of all this? Do you think DS is poor in that circumstances? Isn’t be cooler if those pieces of lore where perfect integrated in the world? And what design decisions are you going to use for URR about identifiable items?

Thanks the comment! Identifying systems are interesting. In general, I think some roguelikes do them well (I’m a fan of NetHack’s, actually) and others make less of them, which I don’t think is necessarily a problem. If you’re going to have them, they should definitely be integral – URR isn’t going to have any kind of identifying mechanic since I don’t see much value to making it a core mechanic of any sort. I like that DCSS has toned down some of it recently when parts of the identifying mechanic were pretty irrelevant, whilst some parts (scrolls, potions, wands) still worked well.

I’ve never played Diablo, but that sounds really interesting, as a way to integrate object-identifying with the story/plot/world/narrative. I honestly don’t know about D&D (again, shockingly, I’ve never played even a minute of D&D). One system along the lines you’re describing would be, if your game has a team of characters, that each character can identify a specific range of items, and there’s some kind of cost associated with that (so it costs experience, money, whatever, to have Character X identify an item from Item Class Y). Bestiary is an awesome idea – I’m actually working on having the game procedurally generate wildlife species at some point soon, both as some nice extra background, but also as yet another “clue” (e.g. “the nation of the white tigers”, etc), so there will be a “bestiary” section in the encyclopedia soon.

I don’t, however, think DS is poor – although as you say having a description for the item doesn’t really “make sense” (where is that description? How does your character know these things?!?!), it integrates with the narrative maze of the world so, so, so well that I think it’s forgivable. It is definitely cooler in that regard, no doubt, so I’m making sure to avoid pieces of lore which the player just somehow knows: all lore must be found, or read, or discovered…

Nice post, I just stumbled across it myself. Totally agree with your thoughts about DS2 vs. DS1 and the issues (and improvements) therein! I felt like DS2 made some gameplay and UI improvements, but ultimately stumbled in other areas such as level and world design. It was like one step forward, two steps back for me. There were a couple other things you didn’t mention in your post that I was thinking about as well.

1. Healing

DS2 tried to take a hybrid approach to how healing works by keeping the Estus Flask system of DS1, but also including healing gems which work more like the healing herbs from Demon’s Souls. I feel this trivialized the healing in DS2, because I basically never ran out of healing gems, and you could always farm more if you did. You basically didn’t need to use your Estus Flasks until a boss fight, and it cheapened how precious the healing was in DS1. I found I wasn’t in any danger of dying, unless I took a giant hit unexpectedly or just got overwhelmed by many enemies at once. Which brings me to my next point…

2. Combat Difficulty

I feel the team behind DS2 wanted to make the game more difficult because their perception was that DS1 was known for its difficulty and fans wanted even more of that. They may have been right about that, but I think they misunderstood how DS1 approached difficulty. DS2 increased the difficulty over DS1, but they mostly did it by throwing more enemies at you simultaneously. This is a problem because the way combat works in these games, it’s really designed around one-on-one fights. This is not to say that DS1 didn’t throw multiple enemies at you at once. It did, but they almost always have a mitigating factor that makes them easier to deal with, such as just being slower and easier to kite.

For example, the skeletons in the catacombs often came at you a couple at a time. But they also typically came from the same direction down a narrow tunnel or across a narrow bridge, and they had that dive attack with the enormously slow windup that was easy to dodge and resulted in them breaking apart for several seconds while they reassembled themselves. If you saw one of them do that, you could go to town on the other to take them out. It was pretty manageable to keep them all in front of you and manage the fight.

Sometimes the extra enemy would be an archer that would fire arrows at you, but again there was a mitigating factor. The arrows were usually pretty slow and easy to dodge. It basically just meant you had to keep moving as you picked off the melee guys, unless you just wanted to run past them and kill the archer quickly first. Or you could pull the melee guys back away from the ranged enemy. The point is, if you got overwhelmed by several enemies at once in DS1, it was most likely because you were careless and rushed into a situation.

Another thing is you could almost always pull a single enemy if you had a long range attack, such as a bow. In DS2, I noticed almost immediately that if you try to do this, most of the time the other enemies in the group are linked together and they all come even if you pull just one. They clearly wanted to prevent this as a strategy in DS2, but they didn’t change nearly enough about the combat system to really accommodate it IMO.

This extends to the boss fights as well. I think over half the boss fights in DS2 have you fighting more than one opponent simultaneously. In comparison, this happened in DS1 a grand total of three times by my recollection: the Belfry Gargoyles, the Capra Demon, and Ornstein & Smough. I guess technically you could count the Four Kings as well, but the point of that fight was to fight them one at a time, not all at once or you’d easily be overwhelmed. The Gargoyles, only halfway through and the second one is gimped compared to the first one. O&S is a legit two-on-one fight, and it’s one of the toughest fights in the game, but a) there’s an easier and harder order to do the fight depending on what you want, and b) you can use the environment by blocking them with the pillars. They even destroy the bodies of the pillars with their strikes (but not the base) to clue you in that you can use them.

In DS2, they basically repeated the Belfry Gargoyles fight, except they threw five at you instead of two and didn’t gimp any of them. If you execute that fight ideally, you’re fighting three simultaneously. If not, you could potentially fight all five at once. There’s the Twin Dragonrider fight, the trio of sentinels in the Lost Bastille, the three Skeleton Kings (they even split into half a dozen small enemies when they die!), the Throne Watcher and Defender that revive each other (not a bad concept for a fight, but super annoying the way it’s done here), and the absolutely god-awful boss fight with three NPCs in the Crown of the Sunken King DLC that’s basically just a three-on-one PvP match (oh god why…). But the best example of this is probably the Royal Rat Authority fight.

This is very similar to the fight with Sif in DS1, except there’s four extra adds that will easily overwhelm you and poison you really quickly unless you kill them all. The strategy for this boss involves sniping the small rats to start the fight, then trying to kill them all as quickly as possible before the giant one makes its way over since it starts further away. If you do this, then you can basically start the fight “proper”. If you don’t do this, you’ve basically lost already. The smaller rats will surround, overwhelm, and poison you quickly. I guess you could say it’s kind of like the Four Kings in that it’s basically a DPS race, except with an unreasonably short timer.

In fact even though at first glance, this fight appears similar to the Sif fight, I’d argue it’s actually more like the Capra Demon fight due to the small, fast adds you need to kill first. One small problem though: the Capra Demon fight is just awful! Seriously, it’s one of the worst designed parts of DS1. The only reason that boss is such a challenge is because you fight him in a very enclosed space with so little room to maneuver, and the dogs will overwhelm you if you don’t kill them straight away. It’s one of the few terribly designed fights in DS1 IMO, but even then you can use the stairs to cheese him. The Royal Rat Authority fight in DS2 has nothing to manage the fight with, just a giant open room.

Anyway, sorry this turned into such a huge rant. I have much feelings about the “Soulsborne” games! The tl;dr is I think DS2 broke the beautifully elegant healing system of DS1 and artificially increased the difficulty by just throwing more dudes at you simultaneously. Getting stuck on a tough boss in DS2 was much more frustrating for me than the same experience in DS1 as a result.

1) Agreed, they pulled back on the bold healing design of DS1 which integrated well with scattered bonfires, and basically made it kinder (and therefore worse)

2) I agree about the combat difficulty often being from “LOTS OF ENEMIES!!”, but I think there is something else to the combat different as well. You nailed it when you said that the DS2 team saw that lots of people liked the difficulty of DS1 and then replicated it… but I don’t think they understood that the DS1 difficulty emerged from all of its other design choices (deadly combat, lost souls upon death, sparse bonfires, invasions, no fast travel, etc) and wasn’t an actual design *goal*. Whereas, in DS2, they made it (incorrectly) a design goal, and since they removed so much else which generated the difficulty of DS2, they suddenly found their game oddly easy (because the underlying design choices were gone), and thus had to throw in lots of enemies. Bah.

Bloodborne. Oh, my… well, I have the disc, but I don’t actually have a PS4 yet (long story). Once I start the job I can’t-yet-announce-on-the-blog, I’ll be buying a PS4 soon and playing it, so hopefully I’ll write a post about it before the end of the year!